Orson Scott Card’s Tales of Alvin Maker series has earned great praise here and elsewhere. Part of the appeal lies in Card’s superlative skills as a storyteller. Part lies in the world he has created, an alternate frontier America, where history differs and Appalachian-style magic works. Notably, many people wield knacks–more than mere talents–that make work simpler and easier. Alvin Maker, the seventh son of a seventh son, has the knack of shaping stone and iron by his will alone. His implacable foe is the Unmaker (read: Satan) and its minions, the forces of erosion, entropy, and chaos. And through five books now, he has grown and triumphed and struggled toward a dream of building the Crystal City, the City of God, whose citizens will all be Makers much like Alvin.
The books of the series to date have been Seventh Son (reviewed here in Mid-December 1987), Red Prophet (September 1988), Prentice Alvin (August 1989), Alvin Journeyman (January 1996), and Heartfire (October 1998), in which last Alvin’s wife Peggy embraced the battle to free the slaves while Alvin himself fought against witchcraft charges. Now, in The Crystal City, Card sends Alvin to Nueva Barcelona (a.k.a. New Orleans). Alvin’s rather glum about his failure to teach others how to be makers like himself (although Arthur Stuart, the black boy whose very genes Alvin had to alter to protect him from the slave finders, has learned a great deal). His dreamed Crystal City seems never to be. Add to this that he doesn’t know what he’s in Barcy for, other than that Peggy sent him there, and you’ve got a nice case of depression brewing.
But before long Alvin has discovered the slavery battle himself, remembered earlier lessons in the solidification of water, and created a bridge across Lake Pontchartrain across which thousands of the city’s oppressed slaves and poor may escape. Yet they are pursued, until Alvin reaches across the Mississippi to ask safe passage of the Red Indians who have made it their own and barred it to the whites.
What next? Well, he’s dragging a city’s worth of folks in his wake, he’s got old friend Verily Cooper and Abe Lincoln himself to deal with land claims and such, and before long everyone is pitching in to build a city. The material they use makes it a Crystal City, too.
Card makes quite explicit the analogy with Moses, Pharaoh, and the Red Sea, but his real point is that to make something one must put into the made something of oneself. By extension, all who put of themselves into a communal effort are makers. So the dream is fulfilled.
I omit an immense amount of detail: Self-centered and jealous brother Calvin hooks up with Steve Austin and Jim Bowie, heading out to fight not the Spanish Mexicans but the Aztec Mexicans, who have already defeated the Spanish and offered their hearts to the sun. Mike Fink is here. The golden plow finally discovers its destiny. And more . . . There’s nothing to say this is the end of the saga, but if it were, we could feel very satisfied.
Scott Westerfeld began his "Succession" duology with The Risen Empire, describing a realm of eighty worlds ruled by the dead. Some sixteen centuries past, a researcher conquered death by finding a way to reanimate the dead with a synthetic "symbiant." Immortality was at last achieved, the researcher committed suicide so he could be the first, and he became the Emperor. Ever since, the rich, powerful, and loyal have been rewarded at the end of their natural span with the symbiant.
Society is divided into the dead, the gray (who support the status quo), and the "secularists," who hold that people should not accept the symbiant. Die, they say. Let go, so the future can live. Nara Oxham is a Secularist senator who loves the gray warship commander Laurent Zai, who has been sent to fight the Rix, who seed worlds with planetary intelligences. He failed to save the Emperor’s sister, the Child Empress, and protect the secret only the Emperor and his political apparatus know exists. Ordered to fall upon his blade but told to live by Nara, he defies tradition and lives.
So of course the Emperor orders him into a suicide mission against the Rix battle cruiser. As The Killing of Worlds: Book Two of Succession opens, the battle is about to be joined. Westerfeld shows a nice hand at describing the action. It’s a tenterhooky sort of thing for pages and pages! Zai prevails, but then a new object appears in space and the newborn planetary mind–Alexander–transmits itself to the object and gains a colossal body made of "programmable matter." Alexander also quite admires Zai and wonders if Zai can become an ally.
When it becomes clear just how far the Emperor will go to protect the great secret and just how much he has it in for Zai who refused to die, Nara must consider whether to sacrifice herself. Zai must consider where lie his true loyalties. And . . .
Well. Last time I wondered which of the several meanings of "succession" Westerfeld meant. This time he makes it clear from the outset that the Empire is about to fall. There will be civil war, and someone else will be in charge for awhile.
The cover copy says this concludes the tale, but there is room for more. Perhaps Westerfeld will oblige the fans he has earned so far.
Black Hole Planet, Hayford Peirce, Betancourt & Co. (Wildside), $32.95, 250 pp.
(ISBN: 1592249353) |
Hayford Peirce’s Black Hole Planet begins with a crew of aliens collecting "Fire People" from "Ice Planet" as samples to be preserved after alien colonists have thoroughly taken over their world. They are loading the last specimens when something goes wrong. Aldahax and one of the Fire People are trapped in a slow-time chamber, waiting for rescue.
Cut to our immediate future, when Remo Rydel and his lovely and beloved wife Kalpurna are working on a massive asteroidal sculpture. Kalpurna is stricken with a fatal illness and must be popped into the medevac capsule and shipped off to the clinic on Ceres. With his instruments, Remo follows her trajectory, full of hope, and when she vanishes, he is quite beside himself.
But life goes on. He gets a gig mapping asteroids, which allows him to search for her. And then one day his ship is drawn willy-nilly into a cavern in an asteroid. There’s the capsule! But there too is an alien ship, a bit battered, full of desiccated alien bodies and prehumans.
And, of course, a still-working slow-time chamber occupied by alien Aldahax and australopithecine Proharahara ("Ice Planet" was Ice Age Earth). Soon they are off to the alien world of Second Dawn, which orbits a small black hole which it uses to tour the galaxy, to discover that in the last million years or so Proharahara’s folk have evolved to impressive intelligence. Second Dawn is a hotbed of unrest and political scheming, and the question of whether Kalpurna can be awakened and healed is left up in the air until the very end.
An entertaining adventure, a bit in the retro mode, and quite suitable for young adults.
Sister Alice,
Robert Reed, TOR, $25.95, 318 pp. (ISBN: 076530225X)
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The kids have a century to go before they can be called adults, and their brains are of tougher substance than mere meat. But they are nonetheless human, some ten million years after the Great Wars that threatened humanity’s existence were settled by selecting and gifting with powers well above the norm a thousand good individuals, each to found a Family of clones who settle disputes, reconstruct worlds, and in general do Good Things.
Back to those kids: they’re having a snowball fight, one team ensconced in a fort, the other attacking with such things as heat mortars. Ord is a Chamberlain, a Family renowned for great deeds. Ravleen is a Sanchex, whose genius is military. Xo is a Nuyen, a clan of bureaucrats and schemers. Even the kids seem infested with rivalries and jealousies, and the reader may be forgiven for wondering just how the Great Wars have stayed quiet so long.
And now an ancient Chamberlain, Sister Alice, appears in the ancestral manse. She is, it emerges, fleeing a disaster, a wave of devastation propagating from the Galactic Core outward into the galaxy. She speaks rather cryptically with Ord, the Baby of the family, and when it becomes clear that she has come to bear the blame for the disaster (which she did have a major hand in creating), Ord must flee on a mission he only dimly grasps.
He is fortunate to be away, for galactic civilization–led by Nuyens and others of the Families who want to seem thoroughly disassociated from the disaster–is now bent on exterminating all the Families who helped make it happen. Ord is a fugitive, laden down by vast amounts of Alice’s super-tech "talents," and no matter how hard he tries to redeem his own and his Family’s name, he is hounded on and on, eventually toward the Core and the fountainhead of catastrophe. Chief among his pursuers, of course, are Xo and Ravleen.
Reed is a well established writer, with a reputation for deft story-telling, originality, and plenty of scope and grandeur. All that is on display here, but I was less than fully satisfied for a simple reason: These folks have managed to maintain peace and prosperity for ten million years. But they remain pig-headed, bloody-minded, stupid, and venal. How did they manage to keep all that in check through all the disasters that had to stud ten thousand millennia? They had to happen on the local scale, after all, over and over again, and local disasters–from comet impacts to supernovas (the folks of Reed’s future can survive mere car crashes, earthquakes, and such)–are quite the end of the world to those involved. A galactic-scale disaster is worse, of course, but the grandest catastrophe is a mosaic of small catastrophes. And if those smaller ones have not awakened the beast in ten million years, why now?
I suspect the answer is simply that Reed needed a story. He had a great setting, a grand situation, and some nifty characters; if he had to use an idiot plot (which in this case requires an entire civilization to turn idiot) to make it all work, so be it. Being Reed, he still produced a very readable and entertaining novel.
But still . . .
Biocosm,
James N. Gardner, Inner Ocean, $29.95, 319 + xxx pp.
(ISBN: 1930722265) |
James N. Gardner might, I think, like to be rated as Darwin’s equal on the strength of Biocosm, but where Darwin amassed evidence to construct a seminal theory, all Gardner amasses is speculations and metaphors.
The speculations come from some of the finest minds in physics, cosmology, and even biology, and they converge on some delightfully sfnal notions (writers such as Robert Reed would surely agree!), but speculations is all they are, dreadfully contingent on the current state of thinking about brane theory and dark matter, Omega Points and budding universes, and so on. The metaphors . . . some even come from SF!
Here’s the thrust: Theory suggests that many universes are possible, with variations possible in such "constants" as Planck’s constant and the speed of light. In our universe, life and intelligence appear inevitable consequences of physics and chemistry, highly dependent on our universe’s particular constants. Why? Sheer fluke? Are we only impressed by our own hindsight? Or is something queer going on?
Universes, Gardner suggests, reproduce, budding off baby universes with constants like their own. Their reproductive mechanism is life and intelligence; that is, the purpose of humanity (in due time) is to build the appropriate apparatus to let our universe have a baby.
Maybe so. It’s a cool idea and one that SF writers have played with before. But I am not convinced by hyperventilated appeals to the Big Names of science as if their stature should lend wild-eyed speculations impressive solidity. That said, Gardner writes interestingly, assembles interesting ideas, and treads fearlessly into territory where–if only the theologians would take him seriously–he would be expelled on grounds of sacrilege and heresy. Fortunately and wisely, Gardner refrains from saying that the precedent of Darwin and Galileo (and others) makes his heretical claims as right as theirs. If he were less wise in this, he would be just one more crank.
He’s clearly in love with his own ideas, but he is very constant in calling them speculations. Enjoy them on that basis, and have fun trying to imagine the stories they might lead to–before your favorite writers get similar tales onto the bookstore shelves.
No cover available
A Star Above It, Chad Oliver, NESFA Press (P.O. Box 809, Framingham, MA 01701-0203), $24,
477 pp.
(ISBN: 1886778450).
Far From this Earth,
Chad Oliver, |
NESFA Press (P.O. Box 809, Framingham, MA 01701-0203), $24, 477 pp.
(ISBN: 1886778485).
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Chad Oliver (1928-1993) was a professor of anthropology at the University of Texas. As an SF writer, he produced a body of work–short stories and novels–that earned him the admiration of both readers and other writers. As a Western writer, he copped every award in sight. Now the New England Science Fiction Association brings him back with two volumes of forty "selected stories," from "Blood’s a Rover" (Astounding, 1952) to "Meanwhile, Back on the Reservation" (Analog, 1981).
For an ample helping of excellent and memorable stories, order A Star Above It and Far From this Earth. You won’t regret it.
Michael Swanwick has a sterling reputation and a shelf full of awards to prove it. The last of his novels to be mentioned here (in May 1998) was Jack Faust. Now he shows us that perhaps Faust has been dwelling on his imagination in Cigar-Box Faust and Other Miniatures. The title story was written for his wife and performed on a tabletop when she returned home from work.
But that accounts for only three pages of the total. The rest includes a number of brief curiosities he claims to have written in his sleep, an sfnal abecedary, amusements at the expense of Picasso and one of the field’s prominent editors, and more (over seventy items in all), all deft and witty and many of them blessed with an acerbic bite.
Highly recommended.
Wesleyan University Press has an "Early Classics of Science Fiction" series featuring both novels (Verne and Flammarion) and monographs (Larbalestier’s The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction). Now it adds Cosmos Latinos: An Anthology of Science Fiction from Latin America and Spain to give North American Anglophone readers, fans, and scholars a taste of a very different SF.
Editors Andrea L. Bell and Yolanda Molina-Gavilan note in their introduction that Latin American and Spanish SF reaches back well into the nineteenth century (the oldest story here comes from 1862 Mexico). Its development has been hampered by a sense that SF is a thing of the technologically dominant North, and Northern SF is to be taken as a model to imitate. But at the same time, this branch of SF has been stimulated by some of the same forces that shaped Soviet SF, where writers found it congenial as a way to successfully disguise from censors and convey to readers messages critical of an autocratic regime. The editors also note a tendency for Latin American and Spanish SF to be "soft": "the majority of these works do not aim for scientific plausibility. Literary scholars usually attribute this characteristic to the regional countries’ role as consumers rather than producers of technology . . . [There is also an] emphasis on the sociopolitical."
That said, the editors provide a good overview of the history of Latin American and Spanish SF and sketches of the major authors (especially those represented here), as well as twenty-seven very readable tales.
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No cover available
Petting the Time Shark and Other Poems,
Mike Allen,
DNA Publications
(P. O. Box 2988, Radford,
VA 24143-2988; www.dnapublications.com), $5 + $1.50 s&h, 48 pp. (ISBN: none)
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Mike Allen, winner of the 2003 Rhysling Award (the Nebula-equivalent for poetry), displays a selection of his work in Petting the Time Shark and Other Poems. The title poem views moments as fish scales aimed like the denticles in shark’s skin in one direction so that any attempt to move against the flow of time is painful. The image is intriguing and fairly typical of Allen’s style, which can present a night sky as dotted thread lines stitching constellations together and discuss with straightest face ectoplasmic appliances, erasure plagues, and lovers duking it out with wormholes and nanobots.
Image, feeling, and even humor. A package worth its price if you like SF poetry at all.
In 1987, Neil Gaiman wrote the first version of Don’t Panic: Douglas Adams & The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Since then a great deal more has happened to the Hitchhiker’s cult and canon, and Adams himself died in 2001. It was time to bring the tale up to date, and so Gaiman has done with great lucidity and even wit.
Don’t Panic is for the fan who is thoroughly familiar with the canon, from radio to TV and book and comic to movie. Here are background and trivia, people and complications, overall an entertaining reference, just the sort of thing to pick up when you haven’t got but a minute and can’t bear to see that minute expand to two, then ten, and finally an hour. But it will, and worse than that if you quench your thirst with a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster or three.
Enjoy.
John Clute has been reviewing science fiction and fantasy even longer than I have, though a better word for what he does is "criticism." His aim is to understand "the central literatures of our era," not just to tell a magazine’s readers what is and is not worth reading. To this aim, he brings considerable intelligence, erudition, wit, and keen insight, and he has earned three Hugo Awards, four Locus Awards, and a Pilgrim Award for "distinguished contributions to the study of science fiction." He displays his talents in the pages of Interzone and The New York Review of Science Fiction, among others.
And periodically, he reassembles his work, with suitable revision, in volumes such as Scores: Reviews 1993-2003. Here you will find his thoughts on works by Gene Wolfe, Tom Holt, M. J. Engh, Norman Spinrad, Gregory Benford, Bruce Sterling, and many more, ending with a post-9/11 essay which says that "SF contains in itself the portents of terrible change. . . . We [sf writers] would never literally create an act of terrorism, but the World Trade Center is the kind of sentence we write. This shames the imagination."
He’s right, I think. As he is also when he adds that though we "lack the wisdom of gods, [we] now have the strength of gods. We are the Word. We cannot afford to fall silent. . . . We are all going to die if we do not say something good."
Clute is a man worthy of attention. Pay him this due, and let him influence your thinking.
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